Some University students and Charlottesville community members who have dreamed of attending medical school have a small opportunity to explore the University Medical School during its annual Mini-Med School.
From today until May 3, participants will attend lectures by Medical School faculty, learn from informal question-and-answer sessions and visit research labs.
Jerry Short, coordinator of the Mini-Med School and associate dean for medical education, said 139 participants were selected by lottery from a pool of 500. The participant pool was limited to the size of a typical first-year class to recreate the medical school environment.
Short said most participants are from the Charlottesville community and do not have any affiliation with the University; they are simply interested in medicine or healthcare.
Short said the average participant age is 45 and noted the program includes "everyone from high school students to senior citizens ... usually 10 to 15 University undergraduates and 10 to 15 University employees."
Short said many participating high school and University students are considering careers in healthcare.
"The U.Va. students in it tend to be premed but not always," Short said.
Though participants may be different than conventional medical students, the Mini-Med School attempts to treat them as real medical students.
"The presentations are like a medical student might see," Short said, noting that instructors "find an interesting balance between being too difficult and too easy."
The seven weekly meetings of the school will address AIDS, anatomy, aging, cancer, cell signaling, diabetes and hypertension.
"The general format is [a] presentation of 50 minutes of class, a brief break and then another 50 minutes of questioning the faculty member," Short said.
Diane Snustad, clinical associate professor of medicine and psychiatry, said her course will address how the population is aging and how the medical community is discovering conditions once thought of as part of "normal aging"are actually preventable diseases.
"Diseases like osteoporosis we thought were normal aging are not inevitable ... and we can take steps to change things," she said.
Snustad also explained how her lecture at the Mini-Med School relates to those she presents to normal medical classes.
"I use this lecture as a basis for second-year medical school lectures ... though [in normal classes] we up the science a bit and talk more about studies," Snustad said. "The public's not interested in long-winded lectures about studies, and since this is a wide-ranging audience, some people might want more studies, but we have to keep it at a middle ground."
Snustad said despite the differences among the program's students, she believes her subject will be interesting to all of them.
"Aging is one of those things everyone is doing -- it's the one universal," she said.
Students also are divided into smaller groups one night to attend different clinical labs.
"The group is split into small groups of about six or seven and fan out to 14 or 15 medical labs ... so they can see and sometimes do research going on in the University community," Short said.
Students will visit labs doing research about genetics, cancer and other medical topics.
Richard Day, professor of medicine, endocrinology and metabolism, is one researcher who will show participants how medical research occurs on Grounds.
"We take the participants to a conference room and give a short introduction to what the lab does ... bring them back to the lab and show them some of the techniques and get them some hands-on experience," Day said.
Day said he would show students a gel electrophoresis procedure, used in DNA testing, similar to operations technicians perform in his molecular biology lab.
"We'll show them how we can select colonies to isolate DNA ... and show them some things on the microscopes where we're looking at live cells," Day said.
Day said students typically benefit greatly from this portion of the Mini-Med School.
"They get lectures about science and experiments, but here they actually get to see what's going on," Day said.
Of past participants, school-aged students particularly found the experience a change of pace.
"They said it was a totally different experience to see their book-learning in actual use," Day said.
Students also visit the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, which plays a significant role in healthcare, according to Outreach Librarian Kelly Near.
"The important part about accessing library resources in how medical people practice is that information is changing so fast that it used to be you learned everything you needed to know from medical school ... and now there's too much to memorize so physicians need to know how to access the information quickly," Near said.
Near also said an important task for doctors and nurses is managing an information overload intensified by the easy accessibility of online materials.
"We also talk about how to find good, reliable medical information as consumers," Near said.
She said everyone should be more responsible for his healthcare in a world where information increases by the day.
"You can't always rely on your doctor to be aware for all the newest possibilities ... You have to work as a team," Near said.
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